I came across an interesting article this morning in Entrepreneur magazine about social media adoption by franchises. Owners of franchises are in a particularly interesting situation as they explore the social media landscape, as they are trying to grow their business but need to abide by corporate policy.
The article has a particularly useful example from fast food chain Tasti D-Lite, which is encouraging individual franchises to implement social media marketing while remaining faithful to the Tasti D-Lite corporate philosophy and branding. The company is very active on social media channels and has offered promotions such as hiding a $50 gift card and revealing the location to its Twitter followers. (The winner found the gift card in just 7 minutes!)
Now, Tasti D-Lite director of social technologies B.J. Emerson advocates creating social media accounts for all the company’s franchises. According to the article, one of the franchises got 600 fans on Facebook before it even opened.
I think franchises have a fantastic opportunity to engage customers on social networks, because their corporate structure already presents excellent network opportunities. If the corporate parent featured individual franchises and the social activity they had, it would give them a conduit to a larger group of potential customers and social connections.
The corporate parent has a fran-tastic opportunity to learn best practices from the successes and shortcomings of the individual franchises social media efforts.
Here in North Carolina, I’ve been impressed with how regional chicken and biscuit restaurant Bojangles has implemented a social strategy across its franchises. The main Facebook page features each new store opening, and photos of the openings, and the company announces events and specials on its Twitter account, as well..
Many individual franchises are beginning to get active on Facebook to leverage the success of the Bojangles corporate social media presence. While most have few fans and are just getting started, the Yorktown, Virginia franchise has done an especially good job building off of the parent page’s activity to feature its location and its catering service.
I think individual franchises increasingly adopt social media networks to their advantage, as long as the corporate parent realizes the opportunity and doesn’t inhibit growth.
